A gash sat by my ear. The cut had scabbed and browned, and though my fingers itched to peel it clean they longed, too, for pen, canvas and fire. Papers of various origin and quality lay strewn across the parquetry. At least some of them came from university, equally unessential and unread. Others had wounds and burns from cigarette light. Most of them were new. Few of my older drafts had escaped the Purges. When I was younger I would gather them in stacks, and take them to the terrace in a bin. Then I would set them alight, leaving just a mound of ash.
The methodical witch-hunt and burning was the sole defining action of my young adulthood, it being the closest thing I knew to the obliteration of the past, the mutability of the future. Thoughtlessly, with the inevitability of one who asserts a faith, I fathomed the peace that would come if the notebooks I’d filled as a child no longer existed. Only then would there be no account left of my foolishness, and nobody would remember. What is curious is that even had they survived, they could only account for events and thoughts that, due to a periodic revision of reality, had never truly happened. The events depicted would appear disjointed, even contradictory when confronted to whichever happened to be the newest version. It was what it was. I was rewriting history, or one of the many histories. But Life is but a book, I said, meant to be reworked and redone. The works I systematically burned were first, second, third drafts. They were not publishable. They were riddled with holes, like an old coat. They feigned jadedness, like bad children.
It was when I picked the scab that I remembered a half-written story, a line left at the close. It involved a man of heft, the return of the boutonniere and matters of dubious legality – notably, the consumption of leaf. Alphonse Llewellyn, Esq., would indulge in letter-writing under the influence of the Lotus flower, to the general displeasure of his recipients. He would roll a yellow petal and hide it beneath his tongue, with or without the aid of Slavic spirit, and commence his writing. Alphonse Llewellyn, Esq., would correspond with a cat named Rum’n’cola and concede her tours of his estate, during which he would take numerous photographs.
I revelled in the thought, for I had once met a man similar to this Alphonse Llewellyn and loved him all the more for it. Truth be told, I had based one upon the other; each became another and melded into one. Though they had always been vaguely similar, in a “few would ever notice” sort of way, by the closing chapter they had become the same. It was only upon finishing the draft that I realised the truth I had set in stone. I had to change my protagonist in order to conserve what little anonymity we had left, lest my thoughts be bare to the self-appointed critic. With a certain optimism, I vowed not to shift his essence or core. If in reality he knew the language of flowers I would make him a lepidopterist; if he dabbled in the crafts, I would hand him a cuatro.
[...]
